Dreams of a Rose
by AngelCeleste85
Summary: Songfic to Desert Rose, by Sting. The lines between past and present, between present and future, and between dreams and reality bend, blur and disappear for our dearly beloved Phantom. This is a strange fic, please R&R and enjoy!


Disclaimer: If I owned the Phantom of the Opera I'd have much better things to do with his time and mine than write fics. And if I owned the rights to "Desert Rose" like Sting and Cheb Mami do (::loves Mami's voice. goes starry-eyed #*.*#, sighs::). if I owned "Desert Rose" I too would likely be rolling in dough and writing my own hit songs instead of writing my poor little songfics.  
  
Other notes: Strong use of artistic license here, I'm blurring Erik's present with a possible past, Christine with a girl she reminds him of from the Persian court. ::waves her blank paper around::  
  
Angelic Lawyer, I saw your comment on "Losing It," thank you! I'd write these anyway, but it's so much more rewarding to know other people enjoy reading them. Honestly, I don't think my work is any better than the average writing out there, and considerably worse than some, but I'm the harshest critic I have. Still, I think I'm getting better since I'm learning not to censor my own emotions when write from Erik's POV, and for that I have all you kind reviewers to thank!  
  
So, I'm dedicating this fic, officially, to everyone who has so far read and reviewed any of my stories up to this point: this is my thank you for your input (especially on Lachesis' Weavings, which has reached 50 reviews, wowzers)!  
  
***** Adding this note halfway through, or about two days into it. This story is intense to write, I can't keep at it for more than a few minutes at a time though I'm flooded with ideas. I think I understand now how Erik must have felt writing DJT, except that I can't go for days and days without food or rest. It's bloody tough to write this one, so I do hope someone enjoys this and that I do one of my all-time favorite songs justice!  
  
No, I can't put in italics or bold text, so I use double brackets, je regret!  
  
// song lyrics // [[ Erik's thoughts ]]  
  
~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
Dreams of a Rose By AngelCeleste85  
  
~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
// I dream of rain //  
  
The rain was heavy around him as he walked, but did not touch him: an icy Parisian winter rain, yet it struck the hot desert sand and hissed into steam. Within moments the fog was thicker than the rain, an amorphous gray curtain that enveloped him in its cool, damp touch.  
  
The fog wet him in a way the rain could not, its damp fingers leaving its moisture in beads on his mask, on his exposed cheek. His clothes, no longer his habitual Western formal attire but the flowing robes of the Persian court, hung from him sodden with water. But save for his face and clothing, he was dry.  
  
Shapes appeared through the mist, shadows of human forms laughing and dancing and talking. How he knew there was sound, he did not know, for the mist was yet soundproof. The figures seemed familiar to him somehow.  
  
One emerged from the fog, behind her veil he could not tell who she was but he knew he knew her. Oddly, the rain that did not touch him, the mist that soaked him through. neither touched this girl. She was dressed as the girls of the Shah's harem dressed, in billowing pantaloons of orange silk. Above her veil, black eyes sparkled at him from within an olive complexion. The tight cuffs at her ankles and wrists that secured the thin, nearly sheer material were of gold as was the wide woven belt around her waist. Carefully he averted his eyes from the sight before him. But he knew her from somewhere.  
  
// I dream of gardens in the desert sand //  
  
The nameless girl took his hand. He tried gently to withdraw it, but she took it back and tugged gently, gesturing for him to come with her. He bowed his head slightly in acceptance and they moved forward through the mist.  
  
With no warning, he stepped into the Women's Garden. A sunset resplendent in purple and indigo blazed above the palace behind him and the garden, the scent of roses and jasmine filled the air. Around him were many women, all dressed differently. There was Eastern dress and Western, a curious mix of both that made his brows raise. Some sat cross-legged on cushion, some reclined, others read aloud while yet others played music. He knew every last one of them from somewhere, without being able to tack a name to any.  
  
Erik tried to back out, he should not be here! But only a solid wall met him and he could see no other exit. The women smiled and did not give him a second glance, as though his presence here was perfectly normal. As he sat, he realized his clothing had changed, to that of the eunuchs who attended the ladies of the harem. Again, it did not seem strange and he took a seat among the women.  
  
One of the women approached him after a time. She wore a white silk wedding dress of Western style, her face was obscured by a gauzy wedding veil. Long blonde curls swept around her, a cascade to her waist. This one, Erik felt certain he should know.  
  
When she stopped in front of him, Erik arose smoothly, now dressed in his most formal Western attire. Something about her was so familiar, why could he not place a name to her face? He held two roses out for her in his right hand, where they had come from he had no idea. One redder than blood, the other yellow like a sunset. Without a word being spoken he knew she understood, he was asking her to choose.  
  
The woman, not much more than a girl-child, stepped up to him and kissed him through her veil. It was soft and chaste, and he felt one of the roses being removed from his hand and replaced. He looked down as the girl stepped back. She held the yellow rose, and he held the red and one that was whiter than snow with a stem as black and hard as ebony.  
  
Tears came to his eyes unbidden, the tears he had refused to shed since he was a little boy, and tried to let the overflow of grief run off. There was no hope for that, so insignificant a gesture compared to the magnitude of despair he felt. Impulsively he darted forward to where she was already turning away and kissed her through the veil, hard, an act of desperation. Erik felt a sharp pain in his hand as he did, but did not care.  
  
Slowly she put the veil back over her head.  
  
It was Christine.  
  
As carefully as though she were the white rose, he folded her to his breast, trying not to mar that lovely dress with blood. He could feel his life draining away with the wound in his hand, but the pain in his chest hurt worse. He looked down, half-expecting to find a knife in his heart but the lace of his dress shirt was impeccably white as always. But his hand.  
  
The red rose had withered until it was only a bunch of dried petals. The white rose, Christine's rose. His hand must have clenched around the stem, for a massive thorn was driven straight through the formal white glove and all the way through his palm!  
  
// I wake in pain //  
  
Erik woke from the shock. His hand hurt and his chest burned: he staggered out of the coffin and fumbled for water. He couldn't grasp the glass in his right hand and knocked it over instead. Stumbling to the kitchen, he poured himself another glass of water and downed it from his left hand.  
  
// I dream of love as time runs through my hands //  
  
Now, in the light, he could spare a thought for the secondary pain. He stopped short when he saw it.  
  
A long black thorn was unaccountably driven through his long, slender hand: the sharp tip protruded from the back in the same way the broad, thick base emerged from the inside of the palm.  
  
Erik sat down hard in the large black throne once the thorn was removed and his hand bandaged. His chest was not so painful now, and Erik hoped that it would pass without incident.  
  
[[ The only dreams I've ever woken up from with injuries to match were when someone was hurting me in reality as well. and yet that had the feel of the future to it. I've had enough of those to know. ]]  
  
Erik could name all those women now. They were all the women who had impacted his life. Some of the names he knew, some he did not. But all of them had helped to shape his life in one way or another. The specters of the past. had they come forward to foretell his future?  
  
~*~*~*~*~  
  
// I dream of fire //  
  
"Don Juan" surged like flame through his blood, the emotions he repressed so ruthlessly free to play now as never they could at any other time. Love for this girl collided with a fury at the way she toyed with him and a terrible, sinking despair for she had ripped the mask from his face before either of them was ready for her to see that! All three of these powerful emotions, they raced through him, fighting each other with such intensity that it began to blur the lines of past and present.  
  
Christine was in the other room, he had promised her she would never hear this for it burned in a way most inappropriate for her to hear. But it was passionate music for a time when two different passions collided in him, he knew he should stop playing but his fingers found the keys of their own accord and would not cease!  
  
// Those dreams are tied to a horse that will never tire //  
  
The music both thrilled through Erik and exhausted him in ways he'd never thought possible: it was a slave driver and the only lover he had ever needed, giving as much as it took from him. It sustained him for weeks while he was driven nearly insane with the need to get the words the music spoke to him out of his head and onto the paper, he would pause in his playing every few bars and scribble hurriedly and resume playing, then pause again, scarcely thinking, with barely the time to breathe!  
  
// And in the flames //  
  
[[ Ah, Christine, will you never give me peace?! ]] For Music was no longer enough to soothe him, it whispered to him at night but did not listen to him, it held him in arms that alternately seared and chilled, but only when it chose to.  
  
// Her shadows play in the shape of a man's desire //  
  
He could see her now, though the smoky haze over his vision that was laid by the music, sitting on the divan, listening. listening to the blaze of passion that was "Don Juan Triumphant."  
  
// This desert rose //  
  
Christine's delicate form reclining on the cushions laid out in the garden, laughing and smiling as she wove a wreath of jasmine for her hair. [[ Christine? Who is that? ]] Olive skin, laughing eyes, a cap of short black curls coiled on her head, a pile of roses at her side in all the colors of the rainbow and a pile of veils that she tied onto each stem.  
  
// Each of her veils, a secret promise //  
  
Each stem with long, sharp thorns. he read each combination of flower and gauzy cloth as he saw it.  
  
// This desert flower //  
  
An angel's voice singing in a language that he'd not heard since leaving Tehran. She bound the roses in vines of jasmine, the rainbow of silken petals, glossy green leaves and gossamer scarves hiding the deadly thorns beneath.  
  
// No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this //  
  
Jasmine and rose and lavender and lotus, a heady mix of ghostly scents from the past and the present, intertwining with each other as they wove their way into his future. it made the blaze that was "Don Juan Triumphant" seem a candle beside a star, as pale and short-lived and insignificant as that candle, all running rampant through his veins, threatening to burn him to ash where he sat at the organ.  
  
// And as she turns //  
  
How long Erik stood watching her he did not know, this phantom out of memory long past, long dead. But suddenly she turned to look at him from eyes so crystal-blue.  
  
// This way she moves in the logic of all my dreams //  
  
His eyes, no longer deceived by memory's tricks, watched her with an amber glow as Christine slowly rose and stepped toward him. One step... two steps.  
  
// This fire burns //  
  
Three steps... He was not even playing anymore, but the song, the music, still burned within him, still drove him mad with notes that he could not set down! This, then was the music of the night, the music that stripped away defenses and innocence and wrapped the world in darkness. Four steps, she was almost to him and staring him in the eyes.  
  
// I realize that nothing's as it seems //  
  
The innocent blue eyes broke the spell. He could not give that to Christine as her bridal gift, not even if she demanded it and he knew she never would. He read confusion in those blue orbs that stared back at him, awe and grief and some understanding of the dark beauty of the music but nothing, nothing at all! of what he had meant to convey to her. She did not understand what he was trying to say!  
  
It was with a heavy heart that he escorted her back to the Opera House. Somehow he would have to make her understand the depth of what he carried inside.  
  
// I dream of rain //  
  
The tears ran down his face like rain, he had to take off the mask for the salt burned his ravaged skin.  
  
// I dream of gardens in the desert sand //  
  
Rain in a desert, too fleeting to bring life to the countenance of Death.  
  
// I wake in pain //  
  
His chest hurt again, not the shooting agony that forced him to sit quietly so often now but only the dry, aching hollow of a heart starved of love.  
  
// I dream of love as time runs through my hand //  
  
He laid down the pole and sat in the seat Christine had so recently occupied. As the little boat drifted silently in the middle of the lake, he let his hands trail in the water. It soothed the burn of the wound in his aching right hand, so roughly abused by "Don Juan."  
  
// I dream of rain //  
  
Water dripped onto him from the ceiling above, forming stalactites in the slow action of time. this place was growing teeth to devour him with, it seemed, but for now the water fell with only the soft "plink" marking each droplet that fell into the icy lake. The waters had long since chilled his trailing hands to the bone, he could feel them no longer.  
  
// I lift my gaze to empty skies above //  
  
He looked up to the ceiling of the manmade cavern, searching for the moon among the thousands of tiny stars that glimmered there, vanished at random, and reappeared again in the light of the candlabras sunk into the lake to mark the safe course through the lake. For once, in this lightless hole, Erik looked for some kind of light to guide him. [[ Even if it is only the fickle and changeable Moon. and yet Christine is that fickle and changeable light, pulling the tides of my emotions after her. and when she is at her best, she reflects only what I have been able to teach her, and again seeks out the light of her Sun. that damnable Viscount! ]]  
  
// I close my eyes, her rare perfume //  
  
[[ My God, will I never be free of her? Everything I do reminds me of Christine, everywhere I go I can smell her scent on the breeze, hear her voice echoing! Always I come full circle to her! ]]  
  
// Is the sweet intoxication of her love //  
  
For once, Erik let his iron control slip. He wondered what it would be like if Christine kissed him, just once? A pipe dream, certainly: when she could not even look at him without a shudder visibly wracking her petite frame, it was worse than foolish and unreasonable to even think of a kiss, it was only a form of self-torture.  
  
But the thought would not leave, what might it be like to be loved?  
  
The gentle sounds of water falling, the softer sound of water flowing in a slow underground current, lulled Erik into a trance-like state, neither asleep nor fully aware.  
  
// I dream of rain //  
  
He knelt in the downpour and this time there was no mist, only the drenching rain that soaked him to the bone and the icy, cutting wind that froze him to the marrow. In only his trousers and shirtsleeves he knelt, the three roses in hand, on the ground before two tall white stones. He could not read what was cut so deeply into them, freshly.  
  
// I dream of gardens in the desert sand //  
  
He laid the three roses against the soil, pressing the cut ends against the bottom of the shallow hole, tenderly touched the petals one last time. A red rose, a white rose, a yellow rose, all on stems as black and glistening as obsidian. He was careful to avoid the long, sharp thorns this time, and suddenly he was buried in the earth, the dirt falling into his lungs with every breath...  
  
// I wake in pain //  
  
Erik woke again, curled into a ball, with a scream on his lips.  
  
"CHRISTINE!"  
  
With his bandaged hand he reached again for the glass of water, these chest pains came nearly every night now along with these dreams! A sudden spasm made him fall back, the glass shattering in a tightened grip and falling in a million soaking shards to his aching chest.  
  
// I dream of love as time runs through my hand //  
  
He had seen something in his dream... what had made him scream?  
  
Then he remembered, hazily. Two headstones, side by side.  
  
Raoul de Chagny.  
  
And beside him, Christine de Chagny.  
  
He had been laying flowers on Christine's grave. And then been buried himself...  
  
He shivered, and turned his thoughts away from that. He couldn't stay in the casket any longer. It was too much like a cage.  
  
Outwardly impassive, heedless of the bleeding, he regarded the many cuts that the breaking glass had left on his hand. Many were deep, some still gleamed with glass fragments and he could not tell how many might still have slivers embedded. Inwardly he swore with enthusiasm and imagination. There would be no music for some time, then... Of all the injuries he could have sustained, this damage to his musician's hands was the worst. He would not be able to continue writing "Don Juan," then... he would have to set it aside. Perhaps he should keep an eye on Christine...  
  
// Sweet desert rose //  
  
Damn it all, all his thoughts centered on her! Why could he not get the girl out of his mind?  
  
// Each of her veils, a secret promise //  
  
He pulled out a pair of tweezers from a small first-aid kit he kept in his bathroom and went to Christine's room, where the light was better, to set about pulling glittering glass shards from his hand.  
  
All the while, his thoughts centered around ways to help Christine improve her voice, she had promised to come again today... How could he give her the lesson today with his hands hurt?  
  
// This desert flower //  
  
The light scent of lavender swirled around him like her blonde ringlets...  
  
// No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this //  
  
Erik couldn't stop thinking about her. All the little details he had memorized over the months, all came back to haunt him now: the way she moved with a dancer's grace, her quiet smile, the fall of her hair over her shoulders, they way her hair, so unbelievably soft, curled around his fingertips, her voice... Her angelic voice, that he would never hear say the words he longed most to hear! That was the purest form of torture!  
  
// Sweet desert rose // // This memory of Eden haunts us all //  
  
He could barely see for the tears that dropped silently down his pale cheeks.  
  
// This desert flower, this rare perfume //  
  
[[ You will not let me be your Angel of Music, Christine? Then at least let me be your Fallen One. Let me stay near you... ]]  
  
// Is the sweet intoxication of the fall //  
  
"You will curse the day, Vicomte, that you laid eyes on her and stole my rose from me!" he whispered.  
  
[[ Christine, you have the power to restore me to grace. Let me stay near you. ]]  
  
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
  
Ok, let's get a couple of things straight here. This most definitely involved the Language of Flowers. Kudos to anyone who can correctly give me the meanings of the different roses I used here (without cheating)! Extra kudos if you can correctly name the meanings of the other flowers (the ones I throw in as scents on the wind). Personally I love roses (of any shade, but red in full bloom is my favorite), and lavender.  
  
For another, I wrote parts of this while very tired. The story itself was incredibly demanding on me to write, it kept me up at night and wouldn't let me sleep the days, either.  
  
Last note, I was working with Leroux's description of Christine, where I believe she's blonde. (She'd have to be anyway, but let's not go there!)  
  
Now that that's straight, anyone mind feeding me?  
  
AC 


End file.
